Learning from failed visions of the future: consumerism and systematic tourism at the 1939 and 1964 New York world’s fairs

This article examines the futuristic aspirations of the 1939 and 1964 New York World’s Fairs through a consideration of tourism history, arguing that these expositions marked a structural shift from the nineteenth-century ‘catalogue of objects’ to the twentieth-century ‘ludic tourist system’. While the commercial nature of World’s Fairs dates to the Great Exhibition of 1851, this study uses Tony Bennett’s concept of the ‘exhibitionary complex’ and Burton Benedict’s anthropological analysis of exhibition rituals to demonstrate how the New York Fairs evolved into ‘ludopolises’, autonomous cities for leisure machinated to direct social behaviour. Drawing on Sergio Molina’s framework of the Tourist System, the paper explores the tension between utopian rhetoric and consumerist determinism. In these environments, the ‘Future’ functioned not as a speculative social goal, but as a ‘staged’ thematic frame for corporate infrastructure, which process culminated in the ‘Disneyfication’ of public space in 1964. It explores the flimsiness of the orchestrated tourist experience when confronted by global and domestic upheaval. The paper argues that the institutional designs of Grover Whalen in 1939 and Robert Moses in 1964 served as foundational blueprints for the total tourist environment, where the ideals of modernity were systematically subverted to the exigencies of marketing.